Renee Lapham Collins: Eighty years later, a monument marks the grave of two children

Thursday

Jan 31, 2013 at 2:32 PMJan 31, 2013 at 2:37 PM

By Renee Lapham Collins

This content first appeared in the Winter 2013 edition of Lenawee magazine.

Their faces look out at me from a century ago, framed in the wide-brimmed hats of the early 20th century, with tentative and uncertain expressions, as if anticipating the sorrow to come. Their names are scrawled across the lightest part of the picture: “Stella.” “Vernie.” “May.”

At 19, Vernie is the youngest of the three, seated between her older sisters, Stella, 24, and May, 26. The trio are the eldest of Noah and Phyllis Brisbois’ nine children. At that time, the Brisboises, my great-grandparents, lived off Pepper Road in Ecorse Township in what is now Lincoln Park, just south of Detroit.

My grandparents married in January 1919 and moved to a large farm in the Irish Hills when my father was young. By 1932, the Great Depression had hit Michigan hard, and many city folk were moving out to live with relatives on farms, where at least there was food to eat and a place to sleep.

Such was the case with my grandmother’s sister, May, who also had young children. She and her husband, Henry Bondy, moved to my grandparents’ Norvell Township farm from Detroit in 1932 with their children, Harold, Robert and William.

It was a hot and dry summer in Jackson County. There were chickens and a big garden, a dairy cow or two, some pigs and other animals. During the threshing season, straw had been stacked up as a makeshift shelter. There was a barn with hay bales stacked inside. And on Sept. 2, 1932, there were two little children, 4-year-old Juanita Mae and 2-year-old William, playing in the barn.

The Brooklyn Exponent reported it in detail. “A straw stack playhouse became a death trap for two little children on the Eli Lapham farm east of Vineyard Lake.” It did not take long for the fire to burn its way through the dry hay and burn the children to death. My grandmother discovered the fire, according to the newspaper report, and was driven back by the blaze. Those who rushed to help could do nothing but watch.

My father’s cousin Howard Perry of Farmington was 5 at the time and living in Detroit. His mother was my grandmother’s younger sister, “Vi.” At the funeral of my father’s last surviving sister last summer, Howard recalled what he knew about the tragedy. He remembered walking into a store and seeing a headline in a Detroit newspaper about the fire. He recalled visits to the farm in the years after the fire and said my grandmother’s arms had been badly burned.

“Your Mimmi’s arms were scarred from that,” Howard said.

I had never noticed and neither had my cousins who had lived with her for so many years. I imagine the horror of my father and his brothers, watching my grandmother trying frantically to get to her baby daughter, the flames singeing her dark hair and the heat scorching her forearms. I think about how she must have looked that day, only a decade or so after she’d posed for the photo with Stella, who was killed along with her newborn child only three years later in a car crash near Imlay City, and May, who shared the sorrow of losing a child that fateful summer.

The funeral for the children was held three days later, on Sept. 5. The newspaper account reports the charred remains of the two were placed in the same casket and buried in the churchyard cemetery. But their grave was never marked and the day never mentioned again, as if to obliterate their short lives and tragic deaths.

Twenty-six years later, I was born and given the name “Juanita Renee.” The memory was too fresh for my parents to call me “Nita,” so I became “Renee” and somehow knew not to ask questions of my grandparents or my father. Two years ago when I found the account of the fire, I wanted to find the grave and somehow commemorate the short lives of Juanita and Billy.

Last Sept. 2 marked 80 years since the fire. My sister and her husband, Rhoda and Tom May of Wauseon, frequently work estate sales and over the summer found a small cemetery monument at an estate sale for $40. Melody Camp at Adrian Monument worked with them to get the engraving done and arranged the setup.

Thanks to a map at St. Joseph Shrine, we knew the most likely site – known as C-95—and it was there on a warm December afternoon cemetery sexton Scott Hunt placed the concrete slab to cradle the single grave marker.

Two weeks later, a cold wind was blowing off Iron Lake as Leo LeClair of LeClair Monuments in Lambertville hauled the marble marker and its base off the back of his pickup and onto a dolly and made his way a short distance to the site. LeClair has been working in the monument business since he was a kid. He inherited the business and his talents from his grandfather. He remembers he once planned to be a chemical engineer but a program in the early 1970s showing a chemical engineer working as a janitor changed his mind.

“My grandfather told me I’d never make a lot of money but I’d always have a job,” LeClair recalls as he sets the marker atop the concrete slab. “What’s that saying? If you do what you love, you’ll never work another day in your life.”

I laugh with him and ask him just how long he’s been engraving headstones. He tells me he’s been doing designs since he was a kid but didn’t start engraving until he was about 15. He’s matched perfectly the font of the words “Our Baby” engraved on the gray marble stone at some previous time.

But space was limited so he couldn’t put every single letter on its face, he explains as he straightened the stone on its base and retrieved his adhesive applicator. He works his way carefully around the base and tells me it will be set after 24 hours. He’s looking again at the dates on the marker.

“It’s been 80 years since they died?” he asks.

I nod.

“Well, it’s good to do something like this,” he says. “This way, they will be remembered. Everyone deserves to have something when they die.”

We parted ways shortly after that. I stayed behind, studying the names, tracing them with my index finger and thinking about the lives lost and found again, laid to rest in the shade of a stone church.

Renee Lapham Collins is an assistant professor of journalism at Adrian College.